Community Informatics: another student’s perspective

Looks like I’m not the only one wondering about the limitations of CI practice. Reflections from the University of Illinois’s CI Initiative blog:

“Can Community Informatics happen in a community when the community is a cacophonous community? Within this question lies a host of other questions, such as can community informatics happen when state government officials do not support or desire to fund initiatives by community members to cure social ills? Or when rural areas of a community are located an hour away from the urban areas where special interest and grassroots organizations often forget about them? At what point is it impossible for CI to happen?”

Read the full post here.

Web 2.0: thoughts beyond the shiny rhetoric

We all know what’s so great about web 2.0. It’s democratic, user driven, community based, open, user-friendly… like the internet just opened up a whole bulk sized can of awesome. I started to rethink this line of thought after reading Nick Dyer-Witheford’s book chapter “Cycles of Net Struggle, Lines of Net Flight” in Information Technology in Librarianship, and his overview of the development of web communications viewed through a Marxist lens. Contrary to popular conceptions of web 2.0, his notion of this movement is viewed as a “re-appropriation of immaterial labor”; in essence, 2.0 is a form of digital sharecropping, adding a deeper dimension to web 2.0 that underlies the surface of its community-led ethos. Basically, while everyone contributes their labour for free, the running dogs and absentee landlords of the net sit back and rake in the profits.

Community Informatics: state vs the people?

from to bear witness

One of the greatest conflicts I experience in my work that has no resolution in sight, is the tension between serving communities and working within the structures of state power. One of the starkest examples I can offer is the misapplication of state funding in community projects, which I have seen wasted due to a variety of reasons including mismanagement, corruption, and by far the worst: stringent and/or impractical deliverables imposed by the funding parties or institutional bodies that work at cross purposes with/have goals that contradict the needs of community members for the purposes of accountability.

What I have read about Community Informatics and its community led approaches and values fascinates me because you really cannot escape state power. It seems to me that the spaces by which a community can resist and challenge the state, or negotiate and debate institutional policies erode in proportion to the size, degree and quality of threat a community or CI project creates. There is a limit at which compromises are no longer tenable.

advice for new library students: group projects

Library school is heavily based in group projects. You might hear that this is what “real life” is like. I think that transferring dynamics and principles of group work from an academic context to a professional one is stretching it somewhat, but nevertheless, you do pick up some practical skills.

Continue reading for some practical advice:

6 months already, go figure

I have to admit, all my information related ideas are being funneled directly into papers, leaving me with little material to post! I thought I’d restart with a shift towards more pragmatic posts…

On my end, I’ve been quite busy, already gearing up for the next semester. I’ll be the new student liason for CASLIS next year, am exploring strengthening student ties with APRA, and am happy to say that I’ve reconnected with TIG, as a consultant again, but this time regarding donor/gift development. On a side note about prospect research, the amount of publicly available information about donors is really incredible. Is there a word for the issues arising from aggregating personally identifiable public data? If not, there really should be. We still frequently call this a “privacy” issue, which is a total misnomer.

I’m also excited to be going to the CLA conference this year. My advice to new students regarding conference grants is to apply, apply, apply. Your chances of receiving funding are excellent. Also, if you are nervous about going alone or networking alone, just think that many people in attendance are friendly, helpful librarians! I really can’t imagine a nicer crowd to network with. I’ve found that people in the library field are usually supportive of new professionals and are generous in nature – so you can dispel any preconceptions about conferences being an exhausting schmooze-fest and get excited about meeting people who want to share their work and expertise with you. So keep your eyes on your inbox and apply already!

current projects

1. My classmates and I had roughly a month to put together an online system for aboriginal archival photos. The “beta” site is available @ student2.fis1311.ischool.utoronto.ca. It’s linked up to Flickr so that users can help ID persons and places etc. but Archon is in place to allow an archivist or staff member of an aboriginal organization to filter through redundancies, spelling errors and the dross that can make user generated content problematic for information search.

Archon is open source, and it’s pretty easy to use once it’s been installed. It works very well with photos, although I had other classmates who experienced difficulty with trying to upload audio content. I’ve been discussing this system with the head librarian at the special Spadina branch at the TPL, and we’ll see if any northern aboriginal organizations I get in touch with might find this a useful solution. Go F/OSS! [update: No volunteer labour allowed at TPL's Spadina branch unfortunately!]

2. Have been slowly working towards a fundraiser for the SHSS library w/the Child & Youth Advocacy group at my faculty. The first thing I want to buy the students is the Twilight series! And Halo books. On a side note, I finally learned how to play Halo and have no idea what kind of appeal a Halo BOOK would have, but it was honestly the only thing I could convince the younger male students @ SHSS to read. [update: A whole slew of books were shipped up. Apparently the Twilight ones have flown off the shelves!]

3. I’m working on a paper that I hope to eventually submit to our faculty’s open source journal. For some reason, my profs have always assumed that I was going to pursue the academic track, speaking as if academia was some kind of inevitability to me, as natural as aging. But despite my theoretical bent, my goals have always been advocacy, community outreach, etc. Working with organizations like TakingITGlobal, the Inuvik Youth Centre, etc. Theory has really informed that type of practical work for me. Obviously not directly, but certainly from an ideological/philosophical perspective, the influence of which is very profound. [update: I changed my mind and decided to submit a different article to FIQ]

David Weinberger lecture: oddly familiar

FI hosted a public lecture today, “Knowledge at the End of the Information Age” with David Weinberger, who I was familiar with through The Cluetrain Manifesto but never realized was a U of T alum. Weinberger is a playful speaker, and as a self-described optimist, has some very warm and fuzzy things to say about the net. I can’t say I take the same tone, but I nevertheless found his observations about changes in how we conceive of knowledge, compelling.

Weinberger began by describing the internet as “weird,” but emphasized that for such a new medium, it is strikingly “familiar” in that we’ve all picked up on its usage – as broadcasters as well as consumers (not necessarily in the capitalist sense) – pretty quickly. Why? Because internet knowledge, unlike traditional print knowledge, is becoming more human. Internet knowledge is messy, fluid, fallible and complex. It’s not a topical text shoved into an exclusive categorization by a removed authority figure; it derives its meaning from social context, the online “conversation.”

This is why I think it’s helpful to consider the internet as a curious medium with both literate and oral properties.* And although you need the ability to read and write to use the internet, many of its www texts, if not the majority (?), are not really textual. Internet information demonstrates the communal and localized aspects of an oral society (but at the same time, it definitely lacks certain key features of oral society).

Shared Features with Orality	Lacking Features of Orality
communal ownership of knowledge, communal creativity, “storyteller/poet” (vs “author”)	human contact, face time, use of proximate senses: touch and smell, intuition
lack of knowledge hierarchy, elevation of the quotidian and the marginalized, long tail	temporal mastery (see Harold Innis)
localized information (vs standardized and de-humanized information)	emphasis on training memory, recitation, long attention spans, attentional focus
parody, satire, irony, humour; colloquial, regional, and non-standard use of language	information is unrecorded in external forms and frequently unconsciously categorized or encoded (e.g. information may be inseparable from a scent, or an emotion) – see cognitive science field for more info on this.
tangential, non-linear	fluid memories, body/procedural memories

The internet is not the first modern medium to be neither distinctly literate or oral (it does have afterall, many unique features that are neither textual nor oral) but it’s the first one that is so participatory. As such, tensions between the values and expectations of the literate and the oral have exploded as both paradigms struggle to impose very different power/knowledge structures onto internet information. The internet won’t acquiesce to state power and the paradigm of literate knowledge in the way that film, radio and tv have.

But the thing is, the internet is really neither oral or literate, and not even a mix of both. Which is perhaps why these struggles, which have profound impacts on our laws, our culture, and our knowledge, always feel to me like they’re trying to catch up to something else. (Although if I had to pick a medium the internet is most like, I’d choose comic books, and I’m not at all surprized at the resurgence of the comic book in mainstream culture, especially in youth.)

*n.b. By “literate” I don’t mean just being able to read, and “oral” isn’t just conversations. I mean all the structures and values that literacy or orality functioned within. Suggested readings: Harold Innis’ The Bias of Communication and Michael Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record.

y so srs?

Some older people will marvel at how “Gen Y” people prefer to learn about current events from Stephen Colbert and why a video like The Great Schlep can speak more immediately to them than say, the BBC news or local political debates. I suppose they didn’t grow up in an age where you are told to distrust everything everyone tells you, but to buy all their products and services anyways. We’ve come a long way from the No Logo days. Being anti-evil-corporation didn’t seem to get us anywhere except more appropriated. (From the Capitalism & Hegemony handbook, “If you can’t beat em, brand em.”) It seems the only way to be heard in a consumerist society is to be a customer, and then you’re always right!*

Is it so surprising then, that Canadian youth don’t take traditional sources of authority or traditional institutions “seriously”? And if everything is such a joke, and everything is for sale, why not turn to information sources that are completely farcical to begin with? And while other mediums can produce materials that reflect this ethos (check out The Totally Untrue History Of…), what better place to mock The Author and The Truth or even The Facts than the internet?

(from Bob Staake)

The continentalists wrote about the death of the author, but perhaps not quite like this. Globalized generations are running out of spaces to believe in; God has been dead for ages, and the nation state is faltering. What has previous generations left for mainstream culture? We’ll take what we can get. I can always count on my next online distraction and retail therapy. In lolcats and branding we consume. There’s no post after postmodern and there’s nothing to take seriously anymore. You’ll never be trustworthy but you can at least be funny.

* And people wonder why Gen Y is so uppity in the workplace… This is the generation that was told to buy their career through rising tuition fees. Of course they’re so entitled; the education system has made them customers instead of scholars.

Who Owns Ideas? CBC radiodoc

Who Owns Ideas is a great introductory documentary about the history of copyright and current controversies in copyright. I wished however, that it had gone more into depth about downloading music and movies. I was reading a blog post of someone who attended a techy conference and who was very offended by a young panelist who stated that youth feel no guilt over illegally downloading music. (As a side comment to me, someone mentioned that it is at least better than adults who pay money for bootlegged DVDs in Chinatown but that’s really a whole different issue.) I think this documentary nails it on the head. Theft implies ownership; and who really owns ideas? Who owns culture? If it is truly “insane” as Graham Henderson, CRIA prez says, to take music and not pay for it, one wonders about the type of “sanity” that has allowed corporations to privatize things like rain water, living creatures and dna, life saving vaccines and medicines, so on and so forth. In the age of late capitalism, experiences, ideas and brands and of course, intellectual property as it is now called, are all fair game, just as things like non-state aboriginal lands were fair game in the age of colonialism.

In any case, illegally downloading music is not as neatly equivalent to shoplifting or crimes like car theft, as it is so often compared to. The act of say, downloading an entire album off a torrent, is very different from a fangirl making a “mixtape” mp3 soundtrack of different artists for a movie she loves (complete with a Photoshopped virtual CD cover/back) and then posting it onto an lj community of like minded fans (for examples of what I am referring to, look up lj communities for any recent popular film). The motivations, results and contexts are entirely different. Rhetoric about file sharing lumps this wide spectrum of behaviour into one crime, which is highly problematic.

days of rest

In the interim since I’ve posted, I’ve met and surpassed the 21 Challenge fundraising goal, got the school library staffed for next year, organized two really awesome programs (youth-elder exchange, academic skills workshops), sorted through a MASSIVE book donation from Yellowknife (23 boxes worth!) and made some huge orders from educational publishers. So June is going to be a month of slowing down, no more staying late late late at work, and weekends are now strictly for myself. Except now I’m blogging about work. Ha. The funny thing is, I’ve spent all this time in the library but looking back, I’ve hardly done any traditional library work. It’s been mainly presentations, proposal writing, PR, lobbying, and managing a gazillion little tasks. Would have died without my links and notes on pbwiki.

I’ve also been doing all kinds of awesome non-information studies related things and to be honest, a lot of the issues I used to think about down south aren’t relevant here, so my mind really has not been analyzing and crunching through topics related to this blog. It’s difficult to keep up with the technology and news here where no one has a clue what web 2.0 is, identity management is still about word of mouth reputation, and everyone turns to the radio or gossip vine first for news. It’s been a gradual, protracted unplugging from the net and a culling of what information I want to keep intaking and what qualifies as a time suck to permanently cut out. After 5 months of detox, I’m ready to return to my old cyborg state.